Why Ralph Nader is wrong

Ralph Nader likes to make the argument that voting for a Republican or Democrat amounts to the same thing: voting for corporate puppet.

But if anyone still believes that there was no difference in voting for Bush or Gore in 2000, a new Senate report should hopefully dispel that notion.

The Senate Intelligence Committee found that while there was typically some supporting evidence from the U.S. intelligence community for most of the Bush administration's assertions about Iraq, the White House and Pentagon very carefully cherry-picked what was known about Saddam's WMD efforts in making its case.

For example, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld made the argument before Congress that an aerial bombing campaign was necessary:

The new Senate report also discloses that on Sept. 18, 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the House Armed Services Committee that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction facilities could not be eliminated by simple aerial bombing because "a good many are underground and deeply buried" and therefore "not … vulnerable to attack from the air."

Unfortunately, the evidence at the time of his testimony didn't support his version of the facts, and subsequent research further undercut Rumsfeld.

In fact, the Senate report found, there was no intelligence-community reporting to support Rumsfeld's assertion. An August 2002 DIA report on the subject stated flatly that "no biological weapons (BW)-related underground facilities are currently confirmed to be in use in Iraq."

In a disclosure that one Intelligence Committee member, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, called "stunning," the Senate panel found Rumsfeld commissioned the National Intelligence Council to prepare a secret special assessment on the underground-facilities issue. The council's conclusion in November 2002 ran directly counter to Rumsfeld's testimony to Congress: it found that "all the military and regime associated UGFs [underground facilities] we have identified thus far are vulnerable to conventional, precision-guided penetrating munitions because they are not deeply buried."

Even more damning: a key source for Bush's argument that Saddam had aided al-Qaeda was an operative named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. The intelligence community, however, had strong doubts about al-Libi's "forthrightness and truthfulness." And it turns out that his statements about al-Qaeda were only made after he was tortured, further proof of why torture is not only immoral but also pointless:

... Al-Libi only made his claims about Saddam's training for Al Qaeda after the CIA rendered him to a foreign intelligence service (later identified by Tenet as Egypt), where he was allegedly subjected to brutal interrogation. According to al-Libi, he was locked in a tiny box less than 20 inches high and held for 17 hours--an interrogation technique known as a "mock burial," which was considered even by some of the most aggressive Bush administration lawyers as illegal under U.S. and international laws banning torture. After being let out, al-Libi claimed, he was thrown to the floor and punched for 15 minutes. According to CIA operational cables, only then did he tell his "fabricated" story about Al Qaeda members being dispatched to Iraq.

Do you believe Al Gore had the same kind of axe to grind with Saddam that led George W. Bush to so deliberately engage in the deception of the American people?